Name: A Lover's Discourse
ISBN: 9780099437420

Roland Barthes

Here, Barthes addresses the language of love, a language of solitude, of mythology, of what he calls an 'image repertoire'. It is aimed at those who have been in love, and those who've not. A range of examples are included, from Nietzsche to Zen.

Fragments

A Lover's Discourse

Ghee

Dis-cursus — originally the action of running here and there, comings and goings, measures taken, “plots and plans": the lover, in fact, cannot keep his mind from racing, taking new measures and plotting against himself. His discourse exists only in outbursts of language, which occur at the whim of trivial, of aleatory circumstances.

… if the subject awaits the loved object at a rendezvous, a sentence-aria keeps running through his head: All the same, it's not fair have. .."; "he/she could have . "; "he/she knows perfectly well ": knows what? It doesn't matter, the figure "Waiting" is already formed. Such sentences are matrices of figures precisely because they remain suspended: they utter the affect, then break off, their role is filled. 

an always present I is constituted only by confrontation with an always absent you. 

Quite frequently, it is by language that the other is altered; the other speaks a different word, and I hear rumbling menacingly a whole otherworld, which is the world of the other.

arravela cruz

Am I in love? yes, since I am waiting. The other one never waits. Sometimes I want to play the part of the one who doesn't wait; I try to busy myself elsewhere, to arrive late; but I always lose at this game. Whatever I do, I find myself there, with nothing to do, punctual, even ahead of time. The lover's fatal identity is precisely this: I am the one who waits.

A Lover's Discourse, at its 1978 publication, was revolutionary: Roland Barthes made unprecedented use of the tools of structuralism to explore the whimsical phenomenon of love. Rich with references ranging from Goethe's Werther to Winnicott, from Plato to Proust, from Baudelaire to Schubert, A Lover's Discourse artfully draws a portrait in which every reader will find echoes of themselves.

Patricia K

Elena Kuran

Clever and beautifully written with a very real, dark sense of humor. 

Favorite "chapters": The Unknowable ("'I cant get to know you means 'I shall never know what you really think of me.' I cannot decipher you because I do not know how you decipher me"); The Uncertainty of Signs ("I shall receive every word from my other as a sign of truth; and when I speak, I shall not doubt that he, too, received what I say as the truth"); and Thus ("by a movement one might well call mystical, I love, not what he is, but that he is).

enjoyably depressing, makes me feel like shit

this changed my neuronal connections in a way i'll never retribute to society

Stephanny lima

Melody Izard

I must be way out of sync with the language of love. This has been on my list for a while - but my brain is not the type of brain to care about these fragments.

A Lover's Discourse Fragments

Reviews

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